Mr. Ed Hammond:

I completely accept the press will want to get hold of information for its own needs. The print media want to sell newspapers. There is an issue of journalists going on wide-ranging fishing exercises, although in my opinion it is over-played. It is difficult to see how to police a dual track regime because if we say a journalist should adopt a different process from a private individual, the obvious way around that is to make the FOI request as a private individual. The practical circumstances would make that practically unworkable.

Some have suggested press organisations pay a levy on the assumption they will make freedom of information requests but I do not see how that can be practically operated and how it would be possible to classify where an organisation should have to pay money for information and where it should not. One of the benefits of the British regime is the simplicity and because there are no charges, those tricky hard cases do not need to be decided because the system is blind to whomever is making the request. That is a fundamental principle of the Freedom of Information Act. It is irrelevant and it is frowned upon to ask why a person might want information. The fact the information is requested is the only thing that is relevant. Requestor blindness is one of the fundamental aspects of the British Act and that is jealously guarded. The ICO has produced some robust guidance on this.

It comes back to the philosophical issue I talked about earlier. These are public data that have been created and developed on behalf of the public using public money and therefore it should be produced in the public domain as far as possible. It is going to produce difficulties, and be arguably more expensive, for some public institutions to publish information on request in this way than would be the case if they did not do it. If it ultimately helped to make decision making more effective, however, and if it is coupled with effective accountability mechanisms, that is the critical factor. If it helps to open up participation in decision making and to achieve the objectives I set out at the beginning, it is worth it. It is about recognising the externalities and not looking at FOI requests as being a cost in a box somewhere. We must say that as public bodies, we are paying a cost to manage FOI requests but we get a benefit in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in being open and allowing people to work with us and co-produce public decisions and policy. By doing that, the decisions are more effective and offer more value for money.

It is a quid pro quo and the press are an integral part of that challenge. Some of the material they produce will be daft and borderline vexatious but much of their work is about genuine robust public challenge. By trying to mitigate the more frivolous stuff, there might be a risk of missing some of the more serious material. On balance, it is not worth the effort to develop a complicated regime to separate things out; that is the conclusion some of the British advocates have arrived at. I cannot speak for the ICO or other experts but I think that broadly accords with their views.